John High, Here

with photographs by Norman Fischer

ISBN: 1-58498-053-2, paper, $15.95

"This book—and it really is a Book—walks the paradoxical intersection—back and forth—betwe­en substance and spirit—with restless, spare steps. Fleeting images of the monastic life—as an assurance and a dream—can’t quite dissolve the secular disappoint­ments and losses behind each sentence. This way the book becomes for the reader what it is for the writer: a searing study of Here as an enfolded Everywhere." --Fanny Howe

"In this book-length elegy rendered in the sparest strokes, the silence of the dead meets a Zen stillness centered in the author’s own practice. John High handles his subject with the most delicate dis­tance—we never fully see the brother he mourns, but we sense him always, getting larger and larger, as only the dead can do, until he has become indistinguishable from the world he left. In this lovely book, High turns elegy to discovery while retaining the truth of sadness, and matches brevity with a generosity that not only grasps, but also loves, the human condition. --Cole Swensen

"Take away one letter and “snow” becomes “now,” here. Reading this poem, a shimmering, loving greeting for Billy High and for all of us, we become aware of the “leaves and ghosts of leaves,” crows, jays, tulips, lilacs and rain. Writing the natural world begins and endswith a“vanishing out here among us.” And time, the “empty boat,” implies the emptiness that is form. John High’s lucid and compassionate text is threaded through with photographs taken by poet and Zen priest Norman Fischer." --Norma Cole

"In Here John High has created a cinema of the page Tarkofsky himself might treasure. This book‑length elegy for a brother is also a gathering of icons for the end of the world, a world of nostalgia and sacrifice and unremitting vision, the “normal grandeur of abandon,” the poet might let slip, as his extraordinary scenes float before us. Blood, snow, branches, a one‑eyed boy, questions for an empty sky, all flare in this film, this pilgrim­age to a place, here,that seems, after all, as death sometimes does, to be traveling as well towards us. It would be too cruel to say this book is one John High was born to write. Let’s just say: how lucky the dead man was, to have been so loved." --Joseph Donahue